The Bolsheviks, Islam and the women of the east
By Naima Omar (Socialist Review, Issue 433, March 2018)
“Many believe that religion and socialism cannot coexist — that in order to be a socialist you have to be an atheist — yet, the magnificent example of the Bolsheviks’ relationship with Russia’s Muslim population following the 1917 revolutions is rooted in a different tradition.” + Letter from Peter Keighron: Is our theory relevant? (Issue 435, April 2018) + reply from Naima Omar: Marxism and religion (Issue 435, May 2018).

The Bolsheviks and Islam
(International Socialism, Issue 110, Spring 2006, p. 37-59)
“Dave Crouch tells how the Bolsheviks reached out to progressive Muslims as they fought tsarism and Western imperialism.”

Socialism and Islam
By Louis Proyect (January 15, 2007)
“The British Socialist Workers Party has gone further than any other group in trying to reconcile Marxism and political Islam … Although Crouch alludes to the Bolshevik goal of seeking ‘to split the Islamic movement between right and left’, there is very little historical context in the article.”

Islam & socialism
(Socialism Today, Issue 87, October 2004)
“Hannah Sell draws out lessons from the policies of the Bolsheviks in the aftermath of the Russian revolution.”

The Bolsheviks and Islam
(Solidarity, No.46, 19 February 2004)
“Gerry Byrne begins an examination of the relationship between the Russian Bolshevik Party that made the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the Islamic subject states of the Tsarist empire they inherited.”
Part 2: Sharia law (No.47, 4 March 2004)
Part 3: Islamic communism (No.48, 18 March 2004)
Part 4: Enlightenment by force (No.50, 20 April 2004)

Bolsheviks and Islam: religious rights
By Dave Crouch (Socialist Review, Issue 280, December 2003)
“Socialists can learn from how the Bolsheviks approached the Muslims of the Russian empire … [and] took a very different approach to Orthodox Christianity, the religion of the brutal Russian colonists and missionaries.”

The National and Colonial Questions: The first five years of the Comintern, 1919-24 (pdf). By Michael Cox (Searchlight South Africa, Vol.1, No.4, February 1990, p.33-43; online at Disa.ukzn.ac.za)

Early Bolshevik work among Women of the Soviet East
By Dale Ross (Women and Revolution, No. 12, Summer 1976)
“The triumph of the October Revolution in 1917, which dramatically, transformed the lives of Russian women, wrought even greater transformations in the lives of the women inhabiting the Central Asian regions which had been colonized by tsarist Russia. But in these feudal or pre-feudal generally Islamic cultures, where the lot of women was frequently inferior to that of the livestock, change came more slowly.”

Religion in the Soviet Union, Part One
By Paul Dixon (In Defence of Marxism, 17 April 2006)
“This article written in 1945 analyses the relationship between the Soviet state and the Russian Orthodox Church. There was a clear dividing line between Lenin’’s approach to this question and the zig-zag policy later adopted by Stalin.”Religion in the Soviet Union, Part Two (11 May 2006)
“This concluding section looks at how the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church adapted to the regime under Stalin and in fact became a privileged layer of Russian society. The hierarchy of other religious groups followed suit. Under Stalin, far from withering away, the influence of the Church began to increase. It was first published in 1945.”